Has your inner artist been on a hunger strike, protesting to be let out? Or is he or she more of the red-paint-on-fur-coat activist type that’s angry about the high cost of Wacom tablets? Regardless, Ten One Design’s new Inklet app may put an end to your suffering, as it can turn an ordinary MacBook trackpad into a pen tablet.
Inklet displays a canvas in most popular drawing and image apps, like Photoshop, Brushes, SketchBook Pro, and Illustrator, on which your trackpad movements become pen and brush strokes. Inklet’s tools stay out of your way, however, awaiting activation by keyboard shortcut or a menubar item.
You can customize the size and position of Inklet’s drawing space on the actual canvas you are working in, and you can get pressure-sensitive strokes if you use Ten One Design’s Pogo Sketch tool while drawing. Inklet can even work with Mac OS X’s built-in handwriting recognition tools, and a couple of demo videos at the company’s site show the feature in action.
Ten One Design says Inklet should work with more apps than those mentioned above, so it might let you draw in other popular apps like Acorn and Pixelmator. A recent MacBook with a multi-touch trackpad running Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard is required, and a demo is available. A license costs $25.